Hi! I've just uploaded a new revision of Vavoom engine, which contains the test for the advanced renderer, this updated version of the renderer has new lightning features (real time shadows, new lightning mode for models, among other nice looking stuff...), we would like to know if it works fine for each of you, please download it and test, also note that this new features are only available in OpenGL rendering mode, using Direct3d might not work properly as of now.

The engine has code that will select the new renderer automatically for you if your hardware supports it, the main requirements for the advanced renderer is that your video hardware supports shaders, video cards from 2 or 3 years ago will not have problems with this AFAIK. You can get the test version from the usual spot at: http://svn.drdteam.org/vavoom/

If you don't see the new renderer, chances are your hardware doesn't supports shaders, if you think your hardware does support renderer and want to test the new features, you can type the following BEFORE starting the game:

Just to be sure, you are selecting the OpenGL renderer in the launcher? Direct3D always returns false for advanced renderer support, since changes to it aren't complete, as for minimum requirements, the actual check for determining if the video hardware supports the advanced renderer checks for support of stencil buffer, shader support and support for glStencilFuncSeparate method, which is OpenGL 2.0 AFAIK.

Firebrand wrote:Just to be sure, you are selecting the OpenGL renderer in the launcher?

I do not use the launcher. I start vavoom.exe directly. Why? Because the launcher always fail to launch the game. Instead it pops up an error messagebox telling me "ChangeResolution: Failed to set default resolution \ Stack trace: ChangeResolution <- CheckResolutionChange <- SCR_Update <- Host_Frame".

Aha! That might explaing the problem you are having, please use the -opengl parameter when running the game and test again . If you don't specify the renderer to use, it will force the software renderer (which obviously doesn't has any support for advanced renderer).

A few general comments, not renderer-specific:
- Alt-tabbing away and back kills mouselook. It turns it into mousestrafe!
- Keyboard input is still not international-friendly (e.g. it treats an AZERTY keyboard as QWERTY)
- Can't bind mouse4 and mouse5

Now that's out of the way, I've made a quick playthrough in Doom II's first two levels. Two issues I've noticed can be summed up with this screenshot:
It's far from being dark enough, and the way the sprite outlines are blurred is a bit glitched.

In the same place, the missing lower textures around the squares in which you drop provoke HOM glitches far more visible than they are in GZDoom.

- Not Dark enough: You can enable two options that might solve the problem for you, under the advanced options menu there's the darken lights option, activate it and it will make lights darker, you can also activate the simulate faded lights option, which will simulate dooms fading of lights to the distance .

To do this right you need to post-process the sprite's texture buffer. Have a look at GZDoom's SmoothEdges function. Doing such a thing works wonders.

One thing that immediately put me off is that it completely ignores my preferred video settings and forces the refresh rate to 60 Hz. Are you explicitly setting the refresh rate? Most other OpenGL software recognizes that I want to use 85 Hz with 1280x1024 but Vavoom only gets to start with 60. That doesn't look nice on my monitor.

Something unrelated: I wanted to check out how Vavoom handles Hellcore's MAP09 but I can't start that WAD because I get a fatal error 'Sprite SSWV is missing rotations.'

1) Why do I get this error?
2) Why is it fatal?

After editing the WAD and going to my favorite vantage point on the steeple the big disappointment sets in:
- 14 fps - second slowest of all ports after Doomsday
- HOMs galore. This map works glitch-free with all other ports I tested it in.

Firebrand wrote:- Not Dark enough: You can enable two options that might solve the problem for you, under the advanced options menu there's the darken lights option, activate it and it will make lights darker, you can also activate the simulate faded lights option, which will simulate dooms fading of lights to the distance .

I had already those two turned on, actually. It's still a lot brighter than it is in the original software renderer. GZDoom comes closer to showing the correct darkness level (in Doom sector light mode, and with ambient light level set to the minimum). Maybe different sector lighting modes would be a solution? I haven't seen the option anywhere.

dark-slayer-201 wrote:Very good. This is the first time I have played Vavoom. I cannot get it to use 16:9 aspect ratio though.
Is there any possibility of porting the dynamic lights into gzdoom?

Graf Zahl wrote:To do this right you need to post-process the sprite's texture buffer. Have a look at GZDoom's SmoothEdges function. Doing such a thing works wonders.

I'll have a look to it and try to implement it on Vavoom, thanks for pointing it out .

Graf Zahl wrote:One thing that immediately put me off is that it completely ignores my preferred video settings and forces the refresh rate to 60 Hz. Are you explicitly setting the refresh rate? Most other OpenGL software recognizes that I want to use 85 Hz with 1280x1024 but Vavoom only gets to start with 60. That doesn't look nice on my monitor.

Vavoom uses the refresh rate that is set on Windows, I've got mine set to 75 Hz, with the recent changes I can't get more than 70 FPS, even when drawing the automap, performance with the new rendering methods still needs improvements, but it's not easy to get it to the best, I hope that with the time we'll improve them as much as possible .

Graf Zahl wrote:Something unrelated: I wanted to check out how Vavoom handles Hellcore's MAP09 but I can't start that WAD because I get a fatal error 'Sprite SSWV is missing rotations.'

1) Why do I get this error?
2) Why is it fatal?

I'm not sure, I'll have to check the WAD file and determine what causes it, it shouldn't be a fatal error, I'll discuss it with Janis.

Graf Zahl wrote:After editing the WAD and going to my favorite vantage point on the steeple the big disappointment sets in:
- 14 fps - second slowest of all ports after Doomsday
- HOMs galore. This map works glitch-free with all other ports I tested it in.

As I said, Vavoom's renderer is still slow, there should be a way to improve the renderer, but it's not easy to find it, if anyone has ideas on this, it would be good to hear them, lol.

dark-slayer-201 wrote:That has the old hacky ones. I meant pore the Realtime lights.

dark-slayer-201 wrote:

dark-slayer-201 wrote:Very good. This is the first time I have played Vavoom. I cannot get it to use 16:9 aspect ratio though.
Is there any possibility of porting the dynamic lights into gzdoom?

As for porting dynamic lights, Vavoom's renderer it's very different from the GZDoom renderer, for starters, it's polygonal (based on the Quake renderer) while GZDoom is a slightly modified Doom renderer, I'm sure that it's possible to adapt the renderer to display shadows as the ones in Vavoom, but it might require heavy modifications.